by Lukens, Mark
Ray was staring down at the notebook, studying it under the flashlight’s beam. “He notes in here that the cold doesn’t seem to bother them that much. Like the disease might have either helped them physically build up a resistance, or their minds aren’t registering the pain of the cold weather.”
“Yeah, I remember him saying something about that. Something about how changing the brain could actually change the body in fundamental ways.”
Ray looked up at the ceiling for a moment, deep in thought. “Craig said something was happening to people when he was on the phone with me. He didn’t say they were infected with a disease, or that there was some kind of airborne plague—he said that something was happening to people. And then those articles I found on Craig’s computer, the ones about the scientists who couldn’t figure out what was causing this disease.”
“Yeah,” Josh said, getting a little excited. “That’s the same thing Ethan said to me.”
“Ethan?”
“Yeah. The scientist at the FEMA camp.”
Ray nodded, like he suddenly remembered Josh saying something about Ethan before.
“Ethan gave me this watch.” Josh pushed up the sleeve of his hoodie and showed Ray the gold watch around his wrist.
“He gave you a watch?”
“I wanted to get out of that camp, get back to Pittsburgh and find my sister and nephew, but they weren’t letting any of us leave. I went out at night to look for a way out, and there was this guy standing by one of the trailers. He told me his name was Ethan. He told me he was a scientist there, and he took me to the other end of the camp and showed me where they were digging these big holes in the ground with tractors to bury dead people. He said the buildings in the distance were where they experimented on the rippers. And then on the immune. He told me that they were trying to find the cause of this disease, but they hadn’t found anything yet. No viruses, bacteria, pathogens. Nothing. He said the scientists had no idea how the disease worked, or how it spread from person to person.”
“Just like those articles I read,” Ray said.
Josh thought of the other strange things that Ethan had said, the things about the machine breaking down and the biblical plague, but he decided to keep that stuff to himself.
“Why did he give you the watch?” Ray asked.
“Oh,” Josh said, glancing down at the watch. “He told me I needed to get out of the FEMA camp. He told me to be at the fence behind the kitchen at five o’clock the next day. I was working in the kitchen. Each one of us got assigned a job while we were there. He gave me this watch so I would know when it was five o’clock. Three other guys were supposed to go with me, but one of them ratted us out, and the other one that tried to get out of the fence with me, he didn’t make it.”
Ray didn’t say anything.
“This place you were talking about,” Josh said. “Avalon. Maybe they will know what this disease is. Maybe they’ll have a cure.”
Ray nodded and looked at Josh. “Yeah, maybe. But I still think we should wait until the winter is over before we go down there. Maybe a lot of the rippers will die off throughout the winter, and the traveling will be easier for us in the spring. If they have a cure there, it’ll be there when we get there.”
“You’re right,” Josh said. “We should wait until spring. That’s the best plan.” He didn’t want to argue with Ray—he had obviously made his mind up about staying through the winter.
Ray closed Isaac’s notebook and handed it back to Josh. “We should sleep here until first light. Maybe one of us should be awake at all times. I’ll stay awake first. I know sleeping here isn’t going to be comfortable, but we should try to get as much sleep as we can.”
Josh nodded in agreement, and he was also in agreement that this probably wasn’t going to be a comfortable night’s sleep.
CHAPTER 14
Josh
Josh finally fell asleep in the drafty old house, and then he dreamed. At first his dreams were mostly flashes of things that had happened in the last week and a half since the collapse, a kaleidoscope of images: Marla, Kyle, driving to the pharmacy for Kyle’s medications, getting arrested and thrown into the back of the police van, being taken to the high school, Gardner, the dead LaRose family, Isaac. And the rippers. Always the rippers.
There were bits and pieces of the FEMA camp in the dream. He saw Ethan again; he was standing in the moonlight between the trailers, the gold watch in his hand, the dial of the watch lit up in the night, glowing green. He saw Wendell in another dream; Wendell getting shot at the fence before he could squeeze out through the slit that Ethan had cut, his eyes wide with shock as he slipped down the fence, the front of his shirt soaked with blood, the look of horror on his face.
And then Josh was in the LaRose house again. He entered the house through the door in the garage next to the stacked washer and dryer. He expected to see the dead family again, but as he walked through the kitchen, he knew it was going to be different this time. He didn’t want to see that dead family again, but it was like he couldn’t stop his legs from walking, couldn’t stop himself from moving through the kitchen and into the living room, almost like his feet were floating an inch or two above the floor and his body was being pushed forward gently.
The LaRose family was sprawled out on the floor, just like they had been before. The mother was closest to the front door, face down with the big shotgun blast in her back, the carpeting under her soaked with her blood. The children were both dead, the boy curled up in a ball around the wound in his stomach, and half of the girl’s head was missing, one glazed blue eye staring out from the other half of her face. The father sat in his armchair, his shotgun between his legs, the barrel pointed up at what little remained of his head.
Josh stood in the living room for what seemed like a long moment, frozen there now. He heard the sound of sly movements from behind him: the shifting of clothing, the soft scrape of flesh against the fabric, the ripping sound of dried bloody skin separating from the carpet.
The dead family was moving behind him. Josh turned around, staring. The mother was lifting her ruined head up off of the carpet, turning over and sitting up. The girl got to her knees slowly, stiff muscles creaking in the silence, the remains of the ruined side of her face dripping down slowly like syrup. The eyeball left in her head darted around quickly and then found Josh, staring at him. A tongue flicked over her shattered mouth.
More movement near him. Josh whirled around and watched the father stand up abruptly from the chair, a blur of movement compared to the slow actions of his family. He swayed there for a second in front of the chair, blind because he had no face left, just a crater that looked like it was filled with bits of raw hamburger. Shards of bone stuck out around the edges of the massive hole in his face. He fumbled for the shotgun leaning against his leg, grabbing it and lifting it up. He stuck the gun out at Josh like he was offering him a gift . . . or a way out.
And then Josh wasn’t in the LaRose house anymore. He was in some kind of small town that had been ruined and ravaged by rippers, by scavengers, by bombs, by war. There were bloodstains everywhere among the rubble and debris. The sky was a low ceiling of churning gray clouds, like a summer afternoon thunderstorm in Florida, only there was no lightning—it was too cold for that.
Dead and dying bodies hung from power line poles, tree branches, and off of the edge of porch roofs. Some of them were staked to the sides of buildings, suspended there by metal rods driven through their arms and legs. Others were tied down over the roofs of cars. The bodies were mutilated. They were both rippers and the uninfected. Some of the victims had the DA symbol carved into their foreheads.
This wasn’t a real place—that’s what Josh told himself as he stood in the middle of the street. He knew this was some kind of vision of Hell created for him. The LaRose’s house had been real, their dead bodies real, but this town wasn’t real. This was something created by the shadowy man.
And then he heard the shadowy man from s
omewhere down the street, somewhere among the buildings. He could hear heavy footsteps echoing through the town, the stomping sounds bouncing off of the buildings. The roar of an animal came next. But not an animal, a dragon.
Even though the town wasn’t real, some of the things in it were real, and it was important that Josh be able to tell the real from the imagined.
He caught a flash of movement a block down the street, two people darting out from the side of a building, crossing the littered street, fleeing from the roars and stomping of the dragon that Josh still couldn’t see yet. It was a woman and a girl. The woman was slim and attractive, although scared right now. The little girl had blond hair like Emma’s. Both of them were running, trying to hide from the dragon.
“Hey!” Josh yelled to them. “Over here!”
The woman and the girl stopped in the middle of the street. They looked around like they had heard a voice calling them, but they didn’t seem to be able to tell where it was coming from.
They can’t see me. We’re in the same world, a dream world he has created, but they can’t see me.
Maybe Josh and those two were here in this dream world at different times, their dreams overlapping somehow.
I can’t help them now. They’re in trouble, wherever they are, they’re in trouble, and I can’t help them.
Josh heard a different noise from behind him; it was a sound he knew well, the rattling of a shotgun in someone’s hands. He looked down at his hands, surprised that he didn’t have the shotgun that had been offered to him by a dead Kurt LaRose. He always had his shotgun with him, but not now.
I never took the gun from him . . . and now he still has it.
At that point Josh was sure that Mr. LaRose was right behind him, lifting his shotgun up in a parody of aiming it at him even though he had no face left. Josh could feel the man right behind him. The smell of his rotting and decaying body enveloped Josh like a slow-moving mist. He didn’t want to turn around; he didn’t want to see that shotgun blast when Kurt LaRose fired the weapon.
Josh woke up. He sat up quickly on the floor. It was still very dark in the house, but it felt like he had slept a few hours, even though his sleep had been fitful and he was still exhausted. He looked around, making out the shapes of Ray and Mike not too far away, both of them breathing heavily as they slept. He looked for Emma—she wasn’t there.
His heart skipped a beat, and for just a moment he thought he might still be trapped in a dream. But then he heard a noise over by the living room window. He turned and saw Emma standing there, silhouetted in front of the window.
Josh got up and hurried over to her. “You okay?” he asked, whispering.
“Yes, I’m okay,” she whispered back.
“What are you doing over here? Did you hear something out there?”
“No. I just needed to get up for a little bit. The floor was hurting my back.”
“Yeah, mine too,” Josh said and breathed out a sigh of relief. He stared out at the dark world beyond the window. Even though a faint moonlight lit up the night, Josh could hardly see anything out there except the silhouette of the treetops against the slightly lighter night sky. He thought the eastern horizon was just beginning to lighten up somewhere behind those trees, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Is it morning yet?” Emma asked.
Josh realized that she wouldn’t be able to tell what time it was. He turned away from the window and pushed the button on the side of his wristwatch, lighting it up. “Yeah, almost.”
“Did you have a bad dream?” Emma asked.
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“It sounded like it right before you woke up.”
“That bad, huh?” he asked and smiled.
She laughed a little. He loved the sound of her laugh. He wished he could see her smiling right now.
“Ray and Mike are still asleep?” she asked.
“Yeah. I think Ray probably tried to stay up the whole night. I thought he might wake one of us up.” But Josh was sure Ray didn’t want to wake any of them up. Who could he trust to stand guard? His eleven-year-old son? A blind woman? Or the drug addict whom he didn’t trust?
“What did you dream about?” Emma asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“No, not at all,” he whispered. “I had a dream about him again. The shadowy man.”
“The shadowy man, is that what you call him?”
Josh shrugged, and then he realized that she couldn’t see his gesture. “For some reason, in this dream he seemed to be a dragon.”
“A dragon? You saw a dragon?”
“No. I didn’t see one. I heard heavy footsteps behind some buildings. And I heard the roar of an animal. But it seemed like I just knew a dragon was coming. Like maybe he wanted me to think he was a dragon.” Josh hesitated for a moment. “Do you know his name?”
“No,” she answered. “But Ray calls him the shadowy man, too. I think this man in our dreams has a lot of names.”
“Well, I didn’t actually see him in the dream, I didn’t see the dragon, but I knew he was there. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel him there.”
“That’s what happens in my dreams,” she said with a slight shudder. “I can feel him close by. I can feel him watching me. It feels like he’s going to grab me at any second.”
“I saw the dead family again in my dream. The ones I saw in that house when I ran away from the FEMA camp. The house where I found the shotgun and the backpack. They were the LaRose family. That was their name. I saw their name on the mail in their house, on an electric bill.”
Emma didn’t say anything. She had her blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She shivered a little. From the cold, Josh thought, but also from the details of his dream.
“They were all dead when I found them,” Josh said, still talking in a low voice. “The father had killed his whole family and then himself. He was in his chair, the shotgun on the floor between his legs, the barrel still pointed up at him. But in my dream they were getting up from the floor. The father stood up and tried to hand me the shotgun. And then I was in this . . . this town, but it was like some town from Hell with all of these dead people hanging everywhere, hanging from buildings and trees and light poles. And I could feel him there.”
“What else did you see?” Emma asked.
“I saw a woman and a girl. The woman was maybe my age. She had dark hair. And the girl was maybe eight or nine years old. She had blond hair. As light as yours. I don’t think the girl was the woman’s daughter, but they were traveling together. Running from the dragon. They were scared. I called out to them, but they couldn’t seem to tell where my voice was coming from, even though I was right down the street. I know they heard me. I know they sensed me. It’s not like the dreams I had about you, where you talked to me.”
“Like I said before, I don’t really remember those dreams. It felt like I had been somewhere else for a while when I was asleep, but I don’t remember talking to you or giving you instructions to come find us.”
“Part of you was there in my dreams.”
Emma nodded. “Yeah. I guess I was.”
“This woman and this girl. They seem important. Like they’re supposed to be with us. I saw Ray and Mike in my dreams before and now we’re all together. And there’s this other guy I’ve seen a few times, too. He looks mean, but I guess he’s one of us, right?”
“I think so.”
“I wouldn’t be dreaming about these people if they weren’t supposed to be with us, right?”
Emma just shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I think we’re all supposed to be together,” Josh decided. “You said that in the dreams. I think we’re supposed to find those people, or they’re supposed to find us. Maybe you’re in their dreams without remembering it, talking to each of them, telling them to find us at the cabin. Or at Avalon.”
“Josh, I really don’t know.”
Josh could tell that he was bugging Emma too much, getting a little to
o excited. He took a deep breath. “Sorry. It’s just that all of this is so strange. I mean the world falling apart, most people affected by a plague, and now these dreams. I’ve never had dreams like these.”
Ray was stirring. It sounded like he was getting up from the floor. He was heading their way a few seconds later, hurrying but trying to be quiet. “What’s wrong?” he whispered in a sleep-heavy voice. “Did you hear some rippers?”
“No,” Emma said. “It’s nothing. Josh just woke up. I’ve been awake for at least an hour.”
Ray seemed to relax a little.
“I was having a nightmare,” Josh told Ray. “Emma said I was crying out in my sleep. I’m surprised I didn’t wake you up.”
Ray just nodded, not replying. It had gotten lighter inside the house over the last fifteen minutes while he’d been talking to Emma. He could see Ray’s face more clearly now in the murky room. “I saw two people in my dream,” Josh said. “They were in a town.”
Ray nodded. “I saw two people in a town. A woman and a girl.”
Josh’s skin tingled with goosebumps, and he felt like he’d just been punched in the chest for a second. “The woman had dark hair? The little girl had blond hair?”
Ray nodded.
“Did they say anything to you?” Josh asked.
“No. They couldn’t even hear me or see me.” Ray looked back at Mike, who was still sleeping, and then he looked back at Josh and Emma again. “We should get going soon.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER 15
Luke
It was the screams of distress that had brought Luke out of the woods and to the barbed-wire fence. He had walked all day through the woods, and now as the sun’s light grew muted and the shadows lengthened he came to the edge of a vast field with a barbed-wire fence dividing the field from the woods. The screams of distress, and the yells and screeches of rippers, echoed across the field.
Luke stood next to the wire fence for a moment. He unzipped his hoodie and drew his gun with the silencer from his shoulder holster.